On Saturday, March 20, our Art Director Bruce Kennett hosted a concert at his 1810 barn in North Conway, NH. The event was a fundraiser for the local music organization, Mountain Top, which puts on concerts, offers music lessons, and is also very active in the public schools. The Boston-based quartet Brass Venture played to a sold-out crowd, presenting a wide program of music from Bach, Gabrielli, Hindemith and Scheidt to W.C. Handy and John Williams. The performers stood on a second-story hayloft and played toward a full house seated on the first floor and on an adjacent balcony. With its vast, reverberant open space, Bruce's barn was the ideal venue for the quartet's trumpets, trombones, and tubas.
Showing posts with label Bruce Kennett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruce Kennett. Show all posts
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Mountain Top Concert
On Saturday, March 20, our Art Director Bruce Kennett hosted a concert at his 1810 barn in North Conway, NH. The event was a fundraiser for the local music organization, Mountain Top, which puts on concerts, offers music lessons, and is also very active in the public schools. The Boston-based quartet Brass Venture played to a sold-out crowd, presenting a wide program of music from Bach, Gabrielli, Hindemith and Scheidt to W.C. Handy and John Williams. The performers stood on a second-story hayloft and played toward a full house seated on the first floor and on an adjacent balcony. With its vast, reverberant open space, Bruce's barn was the ideal venue for the quartet's trumpets, trombones, and tubas. Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Bruce is Hitting the Books This Week
Our art director Bruce is off this week, teaching book design at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport. Formerly known as the Maine Photographic Workshops, this school is world-famed for its faculty and holds classes in everything from still photography to screenwriting and film production and editing. Bruce is there teaching a course in book design, which is what he mostly does when not producing work for Transparent. He's also giving a talk on Thursday about Dwiggins, the book artist and typeface designer whose biography Bruce is currently writing. He emailed us to say that the food is as delicious as ever, and the conversations equally stimulating. Some of the other faculty teaching this week are Jeff Rosenheim, Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, photographer Sean Kernan, and Photoshop expert Jean Miele.http://www.theworkshops.com/catalog/courses/coursepage.asp?CourseID=2988&SchoolID=33&CatID=358
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Bruce & American Printing History
From our beloved Art Director, Bruce Kennett: "I just got the news last night that I have been selected to give a paper in Rhode Island this October, at the annual meeting of the American Printing History Association. Most of the presenters are PhD professors and the competition for speaking slots is fierce, so I feel very fortunate to have been included. I'm looking forward to spreading around as much "Dwiggins love" as I can." Here's a sneak peek at a summary of his presentation below:
Books Beautiful for the Common Man:
The Trade Book Designs of W. A. Dwiggins
Dwiggins is frequently associated with the gorgeous books that he created for The Lakeside Press, Random House, Crosby Gaige, and The Limited Editions Club. However, although he clearly welcomed these commissions for their prestige, and for the income they brought him, his greatest desire lay elsewhere: in making books for ordinary readers. While others in the publishing world explored their passions for limited editions, WAD was a populist at heart; he worked steadily to provide average readers with a taste of the fine books they could not afford. This presentation will demonstrate WAD’s devotion to the common man through examples that were mass-produced by machinery, but were memorable and beautiful nevertheless.
William A. Dwiggins (1880–1956) was a man of many talents – designer of books and typefaces, illustrator, calligrapher, insightful writer on graphic design and advertising, humorist, essayist and playwright, marionette-maker, theatrical set designer, and expert kite-maker. He developed a style very much his own, creating works that were whimsical and lively while always keeping simplicity and readability in mind. During the thirty years that followed his first project for Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, Dwiggins played a key role in the success of Knopf’s business, producing over 300 titles for this one client! Beyond establishing the Knopf house style, he created inexpensive editions for other publishers as well, always giving them a high degree of visual character and personality. WAD did not simply attend to the visual qualities of his typography, illustration, binding designs, and jackets – he was also deeply interested in the processes and raw materials of manufacturing, considering their behavior and their costs in every book he made, striving to make beauty something the common man could always afford.
Bruce Kennett is a book designer and photographer based in North Conway, New Hampshire. A former managing director of Maine’s celebrated book-printing house, The Anthoensen Press, he has lectured widely on printing and design since the 1980s, for institutions such as American Association of University Librarians, Bookbuilders of Boston, Dartmouth’s Baker Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Maine Historical Society, Rochester Institute of Technology, Smith College, The Society of Printers, and The Society of Typographic Arts. Bruce’s teaching experience includes the University of Southern Maine, the Art Institute of Boston, Northeastern’s Graphic Arts Management Program, and the Center for Creative Imaging. He is currently writing a biography of W. A. Dwiggins, which he hopes will be useful (as well as beautiful!) in expanding the general public’s awareness of this multi-faceted artist.
http://www.brucekennettstudio.com/
Books Beautiful for the Common Man:
The Trade Book Designs of W. A. Dwiggins
Dwiggins is frequently associated with the gorgeous books that he created for The Lakeside Press, Random House, Crosby Gaige, and The Limited Editions Club. However, although he clearly welcomed these commissions for their prestige, and for the income they brought him, his greatest desire lay elsewhere: in making books for ordinary readers. While others in the publishing world explored their passions for limited editions, WAD was a populist at heart; he worked steadily to provide average readers with a taste of the fine books they could not afford. This presentation will demonstrate WAD’s devotion to the common man through examples that were mass-produced by machinery, but were memorable and beautiful nevertheless.
William A. Dwiggins (1880–1956) was a man of many talents – designer of books and typefaces, illustrator, calligrapher, insightful writer on graphic design and advertising, humorist, essayist and playwright, marionette-maker, theatrical set designer, and expert kite-maker. He developed a style very much his own, creating works that were whimsical and lively while always keeping simplicity and readability in mind. During the thirty years that followed his first project for Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, Dwiggins played a key role in the success of Knopf’s business, producing over 300 titles for this one client! Beyond establishing the Knopf house style, he created inexpensive editions for other publishers as well, always giving them a high degree of visual character and personality. WAD did not simply attend to the visual qualities of his typography, illustration, binding designs, and jackets – he was also deeply interested in the processes and raw materials of manufacturing, considering their behavior and their costs in every book he made, striving to make beauty something the common man could always afford.
Bruce Kennett is a book designer and photographer based in North Conway, New Hampshire. A former managing director of Maine’s celebrated book-printing house, The Anthoensen Press, he has lectured widely on printing and design since the 1980s, for institutions such as American Association of University Librarians, Bookbuilders of Boston, Dartmouth’s Baker Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Maine Historical Society, Rochester Institute of Technology, Smith College, The Society of Printers, and The Society of Typographic Arts. Bruce’s teaching experience includes the University of Southern Maine, the Art Institute of Boston, Northeastern’s Graphic Arts Management Program, and the Center for Creative Imaging. He is currently writing a biography of W. A. Dwiggins, which he hopes will be useful (as well as beautiful!) in expanding the general public’s awareness of this multi-faceted artist.
http://www.brucekennettstudio.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
